It seems an exciting time for PC enthusiasts lately with both AMD and Nvidia announcing new technologies and techniques right and left. I've recently begun hearing about NVidia's 'ShadowPlay' recording technology and how it promises to make things better for those of us who like to share our gaming moments with the world.

Today, if you want to record your PC gaming escapades you have only a couple of choices:

1. Use 'screen recording' software such as the very popular FRAPS (beepa, ltd.). FRAPS works fantastic especially on a PC with a multi-threaded processor, but the plain and simple fact is it devotes a good portion of your CPU to the task of encoding video on-the-fly which will impact performance negatively.

2. Use some sort of complicated hardware solution which will decrease quality and resolution.

Enter Nvidia's 'ShadowPlay' technology. You see the engineers at Nvidia built a nifty H.264 encoder into the Geforce GTX 600 and 700 series GPUs... one which has gone largely unused to date save for some obscure HTPC configurations. ShadowPlay leverages this hardware H.264 encoder to allow you to record your gameplay on-the-fly, all without the performance hit normally associated with software solutions like FRAPS. Pretty damned sweet, eh?

Not only will ShadowPlay allow you to record your most awesome moments in gaming, but Nvidia claims to be working on a solution to allow you to use ShadowPlay to STREAM your gaming over a live streaming service like Twitch.tv. Uber cool!

As someone who enjoys recording his craptacular gaming moments and foisting them upon the unsuspecting YouTube viewer, I find ShadowPlay extremely attractive and can't wait to try it out. Nvidia is saying ShadowPlay will be released to the public with an update to the Geforce Experience software suite on October 28th, 2013. Will you be giving this a try?

For more info on Nvidia's ShadowPlay, check out this blog post over at Nvidia.

I haven't had a chance to try it myself, but word is it's pretty amazing on the gameplay recording front. Realtime recording of your gameplay to H.264 video without any CPU strain thanks to the onboard encoder on the Nvidia 600 and 700 series GPUs. So... Damned... sweet!

I haven't seen anything about the live game streaming though aside from streaming to Nvidia Shield devices... that's kind of a disappointment.